This independent project, experimental and enquiry based in nature saw the coming together of young creative persons from various mediums over a blog that was initiated by two young art practitioners, Nilanjana Nandy and Anni K Sharan (https://aboutturnproject.wordpress.com/). The Blog has served both as a platform for the participating artists to deliberate, discuss, debate and as the essential sketchbook, information data base and mouthpiece of the project for almost a year!
The project aims at revisiting, debating, critiquing, testing, negotiating; negating; questioning; proposing, reinforcing etc. the myriad premises around gender. The project aims at creating a socio-cultural dialogue through an aesthetic approach.
Each practitioner has brought a distinct way of looking at gender related issues. While the Picture postcard series by Soma Mukhopadhyay & others looks at gender traditions/ideas from the folk art practices of India; Sathi Guin focuses on how certain roles played by her as a housewife and as an artist are intertwined, in her work titled Performing Life. Little Mermaid Project by Nilanjana Nandy looks at gender attributes in the drawing imprints of children between 5-12 years old from distinct backgrounds through the popular character Ariel, the mermaid. Moumita Ghosh creates wearable sculptures exploring the materialization of jewellery and decoration of body into objects of sexuality in her work titled “My masculine, my feminine & my feminist side”. Jasone Miranda-Bilbao from London in her enquiry Suspension of matter is interested in ways of thinking where the subject and the object are interdependent from the start and relate to each other through closeness rather than distance and separation. Young practitioner Hitender Noonwal raises voice against abuse & inequality as females are not the only gender who faces abuse and abuse is not just physical. Using his own body, make -up, costume design & performance he tries to pinpoint how society is incapable of understanding and protecting its own inhabitants in Abused White. Gendered Objects by Anni K Sharan explores gender categorization and associations through the allegory of non-living objects as gendered entities especially in relation to certain languages; Poster project by Debasis Beura depicts day to day concerns around women and relates them to characters/instances from mythology using the popular medium of poster. Darrell Roberts from Chicago explores how gendered our perception of certain adjectives are, through a survey on the social media, using selfies and questionnaire in I am survey. Merlin Moli questions notions like pure male & pure female and how existence can be dichotomised in her sculpture piece Look at me not with your visual dyslexia and other stories.
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